[Sci-tech-public] Colloquium - December 8 with Roz Williams

[Bianca Singletary]

 "The Subway Series"

A Joint Colloquium Between Harvard History of Science and MIT Program in
Science, Technology, and Society

 

Secondary Worlds of Jules Verne

Roz Williams, MIT

Abstract:

This talk deals in a cluster of "seconds" as they relate to the life and
work of Jules Verne (1828-1905). First, briefly, I discuss the problems of
employing the concept of Second Nature in historical studies and make a
pitch for the value of imaginative literature as a source of evidence and
insight into major transformations of the material world. Then I describe,
also briefly, Verne's years in Paris during the Second Empire,  when he was
involved in both a variety of cultural circles ranging from romantic drama
to popular science. The literary form he invented towards the end of his
years in Paris--the geographic romance--celebrates the triumphs of second
nature while also defying the bourgeois civilization represented by the
Second Empire. 

Verne accomplishes this by creating a "Secondary World" (from J.R.R.
Tolkien's 1939 lecture on fairylands) through mapping the entire globe in
fiction. In this life-consuming project of Verne's, vehicles play an
important role as tools of exploration and also as secondary worlds unto
themselves, with their captains  in a mixed roles of liberator and
commander. I will conclude by showing how the submarine Nautilus (in Twenty
Thousand Leagues under the Seas) is not only a high-tech escape vehicle but
also a slave ship; its story evokes the vessels still openly engaged in the
slave trade out of Nantes, Verne's home city and the primary French port of
that trade, at the time of his birth.

 

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

4pm

Located in Science Center 469 at Harvard University 

 

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